


avowals

by spookykingdomstarlight



Category: Star Wars (Marvel Comics), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: F/F, Love Confessions, Not Compliant with Aphra #25, Truth Serum, of a sort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-01
Updated: 2018-12-01
Packaged: 2019-08-07 10:43:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,068
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16406942
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spookykingdomstarlight/pseuds/spookykingdomstarlight
Summary: A flush crept up her neck, heated her cheeks. “I didn’t mean to say that,” she said because it was true. What she didn’t say and what she was very well aware she wasn’t saying was that she didn’t mean it. Of course she meant it. She’d at the very least told Tolvan as much. Maybe not in such, uh, flowery terms, but Tolvan really was beautiful and Aphra desperately wanted to spend time with her. Not the ridiculous times they’d already spent together—though she cherished those too—but normal times, too. They could get dinner or something. Maybe catch a holo. Talk about their lives when they weren’t facing down the barrels of blasters and risking the Empire’s wrath in the process. “You know what? I should tell her. There’s nothing wrong with that, right? Letting her know how I feel while I’m…”





	avowals

**Author's Note:**

  * For [halfeatenmoon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/halfeatenmoon/gifts).



Now was perhaps not the best time to run into an ancient curse, but Aphra had always had an excellent sense of timing. Excellent, at least, in the sense that it was so spectacularly terrible. It was, she thought, a good thing that she always had her wits about her because otherwise she would have really been in trouble. As a cloud of dust—it wasn’t dust, her mind supplied, unhelpful, but it really looked like dust, okay—encircled her head, she had the wherewithal to let out a single, prescient curse.

“Oh, shit.”

There was no one around to hear her, of course, but she figured she had to say something before she was dosed with whatever it was that the original owner of this burial chamber had decided to booby trap the sarcophagus. Really, it was her own fault. She definitely should have seen this coming. And normally she would have.

Maybe.

Probably.

But when you were just an innocent, happy, wonderful archaeologist like Aphra, you sometimes got distracted by pretty gray eyes and shining silver hair and cybernetics that made you wonder just how far down they went. It happened. Nobody would have been able to blame her. There wasn’t a single court in the galaxy that would convict her.

As her vision began to swim, she thought of another curse. A good one. One worthy of being spoken even though there was no one around to hear it.

“Damn you, sir.”

When she woke up, she didn’t know how much later it was or how long she’d been out, but she felt great. Absolutely wonderful. Never better except for how utterly alone and miserable and empty she was inside. “In fact, I’m pretty sure I’m going to die alone. It kind of scares me, you know,” she said, all nice and conversational even though, again, there was nobody around except for her tools and they weren’t going to answer back. The pronouncement startled her, seeming almost as though it was coming from someone else entirely. “Wait. Why would I say that? I love—”

She was trying to say she loved being alone, but the words wouldn’t force themselves past her teeth. They were like a lothcat that didn’t want to be pulled from its favorite rock. Those words dug their claws in and refused to make their way out into the world.

That was weird. Interesting. Very inconvenient under the circumstances.

There was only one conclusion she could reach. She nodded with authority and couldn’t even feign the kind of cheer she might normally have feigned when something cool and clever happened. But this time, that cool and clever thing was happening to her. And in all honesty, it was the last of the cool things she could possibly have wanted. “Truth serum. Gotta be. Unlucky.”

A sensible person would have shut their mouth at this point, but Aphra had never been a sensible person in her life. And anyway, there was no one around to stop her from talking to herself. Which. Now that she thought about it, she normally didn’t do that either. She enjoyed audiences too much. “Truth serum that makes you want to talk.” She sighed and scrubbed her hand over her face. “Double unlucky.”

Seriously though, it was stuff like this that gave her intimacy issues. If there was nothing else she’d learned in the galaxy, she’d at least figured out this one basic thing: everyone was out to get you. And she had definitely been gotten today; there was no mistaking that. The only solution was to get people first rather than the other way around.

Didn’t quite work out today, but she supposed she couldn’t always win.

“How long is this stuff gonna stick around my system, do you think?” she asked her scanner. It didn’t answer and she tried not to be let down by that fact. It wasn’t like she expected it to respond, of course, but it would’ve been nice, wouldn’t it have? If someone was there with her to hear her complaints or listen to her work out the solution to her problems? “Yeah, I don’t know either. Think you could run a scan for me?”

This time it beeped and that was almost, almost close enough to what she wanted that she cheered up. Humming, she waited for it to complete its analyses and wished for a moment that she’d thought to turn the scanner on while the cloud of powdered truth serum—she really needed a better name for it, Trust Dust, maybe?—was engulfing her. As it beeped, screen flickering, she got a better look around the room, took in all the sights she’d ignored in favor of the grand prize. She did that a lot. Focused only on the things she wanted and never the things she didn’t. Hell, she even ignored the things she wanted sometimes if there was something she wanted more. Or thought she did.

“This stuff is pretty cool, isn’t it?” she said, well aware that the scanner wouldn’t answer. Her fingers brushed over the line of a sculpture carved out of a chunk of granite. Worthless on the market, not even interesting in an archaeological or historical sense, but pretty all the same.

“I don’t think I admire beauty enough, Scanbot.” The part of her mind that wasn’t perfectly on board with embarrassing the hell out of her screamed somewhere deep in her skull, wanted to know just what in the fuck she was doing. “I bet if I did, I’d have gotten Tolvan into bed by now.”

A flush crept up her neck, heated her cheeks. “I didn’t mean to say that,” she said because it was true. What she didn’t say and what she was very well aware she wasn’t saying was that she didn’t mean it. Of course she meant it. She’d at the very least told Tolvan as much. Maybe not in such, uh, flowery terms, but Tolvan really was beautiful and Aphra desperately wanted to spend time with her. Not the ridiculous times they’d already spent together—though she cherished those too—but normal times, too. They could get dinner or something. Maybe catch a holo. Talk about their lives when they weren’t facing down the barrels of blasters and risking the Empire’s wrath in the process. “You know what? I should tell her. There’s nothing wrong with that, right? Letting her know how I feel while I’m…”

How complimentary would Tolvan find it if she did comm her while doped out on Trust Dust? Or would she pay attention to the salient point: Trust Dust made Chelli Lona Aphra into a trustworthy person.

This might be her only chance to prove as much to Tolvan.

Before she knew it, her comm was in her hand and though her mind was filled with all the reasons she shouldn’t be doing this, she punched in the code she really shouldn’t have had and hoped her cyphers and layers of security held long enough for—

“Who is this?” The clipped, dulcet, lovely tones of Tolvan’s voice caught and snagged on the shitty reception of the place. “And how did you get this number?”

If someone else had been with her, they might have told her to not do this and they probably would have been right to do so. But later she’d be able to console herself with the fact that there wasn’t a person in the galaxy who could stop her from making a bad decision so it wasn’t like they would have been able to stop her anyhow.

“Did you know,” Aphra said, “that I love the disapproving sound of your voice? It makes me feel—” She drew in a deep breath as she considered her options. There were so many ways that it made her feel. “—tingly?”

Aphra almost laughed. She would have sworn she could hear Tolvan’s eyebrows furrowing at Aphra’s admission. Only one of many that she ought to have been making. It was easy to imagine the divot that would have formed between them as well, disapproval, uncertainty, and displeasure all melding together as Tolvan tried to decide how she felt about Aphra in return. “Tingly?”

“Yep!” And though Aphra wasn’t drunk, it was a little intoxicating to be here with Tolvan, able to say the things she couldn’t bring herself to say under normal circumstances. It wasn’t quite as good as it would have been if Tolvan had actually been there and Aphra could see her, but if this was what Aphra could get, she would take it with both hands and never give it up. In this, she was greedy. Greedier than normal. She might have sold out a lot of things for a quick buck, but this… this wasn’t one of them. “I like it when you disapprove of me.”

It was funny that the Trust Dust let her say at much, because even though it was true, it wasn’t precisely what she meant either.

Tolvan made a noise that might have been a snort. “I do that a lot.” Then, clearing her throat, she added, “Why are you calling?” There was a fragility in her voice that Aphra also really liked, but it made her sad, too, more than a little unhappy. Aphra was the one who’d put that vulnerability there and she knew herself well enough to know why.

She’d never been very good at loving people. It always went sideways somehow, lead to insecurity and bitterness. And even though they hadn’t done more than get shot at together and make out a few times, she’d already done that to Tolvan, too. It was possibly the worst superpower in the galaxy. “I got hit with—”

It wasn’t quite a gasp that sounded from the other end of the comm, but it was close. “Are you okay?” Tolvan asked, breathless. “What did you—”

“I got hit with truth serum,” Aphra clarified. All sorts of warm fuzzies danced around her insides at the thought of Tolvan being concerned about her. It was enough to make her swoon. “It’s a little inconvenient, but sometimes you just have to roll with it. Let the drugs do their work and…” She made a complicated, flapping hand gesture before realizing that Tolvan wouldn’t be able to see it. She grimaced. “Tell the truth.”

Tolvan exhaled and didn’t answer for a few moments. The silence seemed to stretch and stretch as Aphra waited, impatient, for a reply. “So you decided to call me? Why?”

Aphra rolled her eyes. Sure, there were a lot of reasons she probably shouldn’t have called Tolvan. For one thing, the Empire would have a lot of fun interrogating her right now and Tolvan, if she wanted, might well solve a million different crimes Aphra had committed over the years if she so chose. But Aphra had learned that there’s never any reward without a little risk, so she let that thought slide from her mind. Regardless, it wasn’t any fun at all when Aphra had to spell it out for her.

“Come on, sir,” she said, wheedling, voice getting that scratching, high-pitched quality to it when she really, really wanted someone to figure it out for themselves. She’d been told a time or two that it made her sound like an asshole, but the Trust Dust made her want to blurt out everything. And in this case it just wouldn’t have the same impact, would it? But Tolvan still didn’t answer and the silence snapped while Aphra bit down on her own tongue—she wished it was a different tongue that she was biting down on, but that was neither here nor there sadly—and she couldn’t help herself. “I love you a little bit,” she blurted. And then she winced. “I mean—”

Tolvan, instead of falling to her knees in gratitude and reciprocating the very tender feeling in Aphra’s heart, scoffed. “Oh, really?”

“Yes, really! I’ve been dosed with truth serum. I couldn’t lie if I wanted to. Ask me about that time on Arkanis when I—” This time, she slapped her hand over her mouth and slammed her eyes shut. Nobody needed to know about Arkanis. Not even Tolvan. After a long, discomfiting moment, she thought maybe she wouldn’t immediately spill every detail of that awful, awful day. It gave her indigestion though. She didn’t like that. “Please don’t ask me about Arkanis, but you should still trust me on this.”

Clearing her throat, Tolvan said, “And why should I do that?”

With a groan, Aphra paced around the small section of the ruins she was currently investigating. “Did you miss the part where I’ve been hit with Trust Dust? I think that’s a good reason to trust me, don’t you?”

“I would have to assume you’re not lying about the truth serum first,” Tolvan pointed out. And Aphra absolutely, positively did not want to admit that, sure, fine, she was right. There was no good way to verify that Aphra was telling the truth right now, not when they were so far away from one another. Even if Aphra could somehow reach her, the stuff will probably have worn off by then.

She bit her lip and failed to keep herself from feeling pathetically vulnerable and stymied. She hated feeling vulnerable and stymied. “Most people are happy when someone confesses their feelings to them,” she said. “I feel like that’s putting enough on the line to suggest I’m being truthful.”

“Oh, yes. A coerced confession. That’s very complimentary.” And though Tolvan tried to sound amused at it all, there was a brittleness in her tone that Aphra couldn’t miss or pretend didn’t exist. It made her heart clench up, unhappy at the thought that Tolvan might not be glad for this development, might not want Aphra’s interest and attraction at all. Didn’t really match the way they’d kissed their way through firefights and saved each other’s asses—okay, Tolvan had saved Aphra’s ass a lot and Aphra had returned the favor somewhat—but people reacted to stress in different ways. Maybe that was what had happened here.

“I’m sorry,” Aphra said, swallowing around her disappointment. “I thought… I do care about you. A lot. I wanted you to know while I thought you could trust it, but clearly…” She sighed, uncertain how to finish this half-cocked admission. Now that Tolvan had pointed it out, it really was a stupid idea. She wished she hadn’t said anything at all, had somehow been able to hold herself back. “I just wanted you to know how I feel.”

There was a thoughtful hum from the other end of the comm and then a long, slow, killer silence that made Aphra fidget. Tolvan probably wasn’t doing it on purpose, but this waiting was torture. Trust Dust or not, Aphra was planning on never, ever laying it out on the line like this again. She’d just tape her own mouth shut or something first. That way she couldn’t get herself into trouble again.

“You’re serious,” Tolvan finally, finally said. There was something like wonder in her voice, something like concern, like hope. And though Aphra hated that she couldn’t embrace the admission as a fully happy occurrence—Aphra knew herself too well to pretend she didn’t know why an admission from her would elicit conflicted feelings—she couldn’t help but feel a bit of hope, too, that Tolvan believed her or would choose to believe her anyway. She wasn’t entirely sure what she would do if Tolvan didn’t believe her. Slink away on her next big adventure and hope they never ran into each other again.

That was… kind of the way of relationships with Aphra.

Not that this was a relationship. This was a dalliance at best. Maybe an infatuation. They hadn’t gotten anywhere with it yet, nothing beyond innuendo and possibility. That had always been Aphra’s favorite stage, but she couldn’t deny she wanted to get to the part where it was real. Not just words spoken in the heat of the moment.

“What’s real?” Tolvan asked, confused, and Aphra could’ve cursed herself.

“Just speaking out loud.” She winced. No shit she was speaking out loud. But now she was mumbling to herself when she’d thought she was only thinking. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Are you sure you’re okay?”

“I’m good!” And though she was trying for chipper, she was pretty sure she feel quite a bit short of it. This wasn’t, after all, the way she thought this would go. She so rarely thought things through that it was kind of disappointing how thoroughly the act had failed her so far today. Sighing, she pinched the bridge of her nose and gripped her comm tighter. Cleanup was almost complete; she’d be able to get out of here soon. And then she’d be able to lick her wounds privately. That sounded really good right now. Better than this hell. “Look, I’ll go ahead and get going,” she added, awkward. “I’m sure we’ve all got more important things to do than stand around having awkward conversations like this.”

“I—okay.”

“Okay, great!” And Aphra was in the process of disengaging the call. Really, she was. Her finger was on the power button and everything, but a wave of relief crashed over her when Tolvan stopped her, said wait, and then didn’t speak for a long minute.

Aphra would have waited forever for her in that moment.

“Go to these coordinates,” Tolvan said, rattling off a bunch of numbers that Aphra would never, ever forget. In her mind, she was already there, waiting for Tolvan to arrive. “Hopefully that stuff will wear off by the time you get there.”

“That’s really sweet, sir,” Aphra replied, willing her heart to stop pounding quite as hard as it was doing. She was concerned that it might even burst a hole in her chest. “And then what?”

Tolvan cleared her throat and paused again and Aphra got the very real sense that Tolvan was blushing. “And then we’ll talk about this.”

“Honestly?” Aphra asked, again hopeful. Too hopeful. Hope, she knew, was a bad thing. She shouldn’t have been hoping for anything.

“Only as honestly as you want to be,” Tolvan replied, “rather than however honest some booby-trapped cave wants you to be.”

Aphra grinned. She could do that.

“See you soon, sir.”

And she couldn’t wait.


End file.
